Tax return review, done the same way every time. With AI, by CPAs.
The Blind Tally Method is a reviewer's tie-out run by AI inside your own Copilot, with a workbook that keeps the model honest. The method is free. Setting it up at your firm, and making it run itself, is what we do. Built in practice by a tax director who signs about 400 returns a year.
Get the sheet and the workbook Book 20 minutes
One conversation. No pitch, no follow up sequence.
The Blind Tally Method
An old control applied to new tools. One chat reads last year's return and this year's source documents and fills in a prebuilt Excel workbook, one row per amount, with the form and box exactly as printed. It never sees this year's return. Excel sets the type of every amount from a map of forms and boxes, totals by formula, and lists what last year's return says to expect this year. A second chat compares the workbook to the prepared return and reports every difference in both directions, with the row and the page, then reconciles Schedule E, K-1 by K-1. A person decides every finding.
The model transcribes. It does not classify, and it does not add. Those are the two things the models get wrong, so the workbook takes them away. Control checks have to come to zero before the comparison runs.
Three ways to use it
Run it yourself. Free.
The one page sheet, the workbook, every prompt, and the checks. Download them, run them in your firm's Copilot, keep them. Tested on two models, with the date on the page.
Set it up at your firm.
The Tax Return Review Workshop. Half a day with your reviewers, in your own AI account, on returns you already filed. You keep a written procedure your staff can follow. Flat fee.
Make it run itself.
Every step on the sheet becomes a flow. A return folder goes in, the workbook and the findings come out, and a person still decides. Built in your tenant. If you would rather we run it in ours, that starts with the data terms in writing.
One tested process a month, by email.
Each month, one process we run ourselves, with the prompts, the model it was tested on, and the date. The Blind Tally workbook and prompts on this site stay free. This is how you find out when they change.
One email a month in season. Reply to any of them and a CPA answers.
Planning letters
From a filed return, two files. An internal workbook with the detail a planner needs, the opportunities to consider, and a projection at the Form 1040 line level. And a two page client letter in plain language, a summary of last year and a form for what they expect this year. A professional reads every letter against the return before it goes out.
Admin runs it. A partner reviews it. The client comes to the planning meeting having thought about their year. That is the advisory conversation, started. The prompt is on the sheet.
Tax Return Review Workshop
Half a day at your firm. We set the Blind Tally up in your own AI account, run it with your reviewer on three returns you already filed, and leave a written procedure, a run log, and a map of what your firm could automate next. Your preparers see it find something on a return they know. That is the point of doing it on your returns and not ours.
Taught by a CPA who signs returns, not a technology consultant. Flat fee, scoped on the first call.
Where it began
The blind tally was Jim Wilhelm's own review discipline long before AI. For years he reviewed two ways, Excel tie-outs for the large returns and manual ones for the small, until he realized that reviewing every return the exact same way, with prebuilt workbooks, made him both faster and more accurate. AI did not invent the method. It made the method cheap enough to run on every return.
He has used AI on real returns for three seasons. The 2026 season was the first the models were good enough for a real process, and the version on this site is what came out of a season of running it on every return, then a week of testing it until it held on two models.
Wilhelm Automation Group is two CPAs, Jim and his brother Ted, with about forty years of public accounting between them. We build for firms our size, priced for firms our size.
Talk to us
Twenty minutes, one conversation, no pitch. If it is useful we keep talking. If not, you have a sheet, a workbook, and a method.
james@wilhelmautomation.com | 203-701-9499 | Milford, Connecticut